66 propositIon in doubt, the irony is that at the time Malcolm was slain he had be- gun to move away from the fierce, im- placable persona to which his mystique and his children have now fastened. He had broken with the Black Muslims, and in the last year of his life he had been venturIng, however tentatively and unevenly, beyond the insular racial de- lirium of their doctrine and was ap- proaching a more open and conciliatory vision-a vision closer, if still only in certain nuances, to King's own. James H. Cone, in his recent book "Martin & Malcolm & America," writes that "they complemented and corrected each other." Malcolm, in fact, was killed in the midst of a kind of metamorphosis. Just three days before his death, he confessed to a reporter, "I'm man enough to tell you that I can't put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now." Charles Kenyatta, one of his follo\vers at the time, recently told me, "All this hype now, they're trying to give the false im- age that Malcolm had come to be the Saviour of black people. But he didn't know himself who he was." In the end, he was groping, alone, for some different purpose, some different self-definition. Indeed, at no point in his life could Malcolm cease struggling, as if by dim but resistless instinct, for more light. ^ s Malcolm tells it in the "Autobiog- r-\. raphy," he was born into rage and despair, in the spring of 1925, in Omaha. His mother, Louise Little, was from Grenada-a lithe, erect woman of some- what finely strung nerves, whose own mother, Malcolm claimed, had been raped by a white man, and who was her- self pale enough to be taken for white. His father, by contrast, was an oil-black roisterous colossus of a man, named Earl Little-a one-eyed construction laborer and part-time Baptist preacher from Reynolds, Georgia, who Dad struck out on his own after finishing either the third or the fourth grade. A brooding, disappointed man, full of turbulence, he had become a disciple of Marcus Garvey, who, in flamboyant plumed uniforms with gold braid, was Harlem's aspiring black- nationalist Moses in the early years of the century. Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud the year Malcolm was born. From prison, Garvey had promised his belIevers, "I shall come back to you. . . . Look for me in the whirlwind or the stonn, look for me all around you." Earl took young Malcolm to fevered meetings of GatVey's faithful, where such messages were regularly in- voked. Because of Earl's devotion to GatVey, according to a somewhat melo- dramatic account of Malcolm's, Klan night riders with torches swept down on the family' s h use in Omaha shortly be- fore he was born. Certainly, as Malcolm later liked to cast it, white harassment had pursued Earl Little in his migratory struggle to scrap out a living for his fam- ily; he moved them briefly to Milwau- kee, then to Lansing, Michigan, where their home was burned-by white rac- ists, Malcolm would claim. Earl Little finally moved his family to a rural plot two miles out of East Lansing. There, in a drab and wintry country- side, in a tar-shingle house of only four rooms, each with a single naked light bulb dangling over a rugless board floor, Malcolm passed his boyhood-a shabby and cheerless one, utterly unlike King's. His autobiography contains almost no mention of holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. His father ruled the fam- ily with frequent beatings, exempting only Malcolm, the fourth of seven chil- dren. Earl was particularly infuriated by his wife' s scruples about diet: she disdained pork and rabbit. Once, Mal- colm related to Haley, hIS father took a rabbit from the pen outside and ripped its head off with "one twist of his big black hands," then flung the body at his wife's feet, ordering her to cook it, and stormed out of the house. It was the last time any of them saw him alive. Late that night, police brought word that he had been found, mangled and dying, be- side some streetcar tracks, where he had apparently fallen under the wheels. Mal- colm was then six years old. He later in- sisted that his father's death had also been the work of white racist vigilantes. If Earl was gentler with Malcolm than with his other children, Malcolm surmised in his autobiography, it was because "he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child." Of a brassy hue-"bright," it was sometimes called-he te-TCLN\. seemed tortured by the white- THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 12, 1992 ness in him He later told his followers, of the man he claimed had raped his mother's mother, ''Yes, that raping, red- headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother's father! . . . If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I'd do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist's blood that's in me." There were moments, Malcolm said, when that most intimate of helpless outrages to his person left him "so choked up" that he would stalk the streets, solitary, late into the night. Mter his father's death, his mother struggled on in a Depression poverty so stark that sometimes she had nothing to feed her famùy except stale surplus bread and boiled dandelion greens, and the children would be "dizzy" with hunger. Málcolm, at school, would huddle off by himself to eat a wild-leek sandwich. Before long, the remnants of the family began to disintegrate. "Some kind of psychological deterioration began to eat away our pride," Malcolm later said. At the age of nine, he began pilfering from stores in town. And his mother, sitting alone in a rocking chair chattering to herself with all window shades drawn, began to drift into insanIty. The Christ- mas of Malcolm's thirteenth year, ac- cording to Bruce Perry's "Malcolm," a formidably researched biography that appeared in 1991, his mother was found wandering barefoot along a snow- dappled road, dirty and unkempt and clutching a baby, her eighth, this one il- legitimate. Shortly afterward, she was delivered into a state mental hospital. Her children were scattered about as wards of the state, and Malcolm was briefly in a detention home. Such hurt does not readily permit the inward grace for any sort of transcendent understanding like King's. Its only gift is, perhaps, a certain icy unsentimental- ity, a terrible bleak clarity of conscious- ness. At any rate, Malcolm never forgave white society for what had happened to him. By that time, he had reached the seventh grade, and was a tall, gawky youth, preternaturally bright and quick, but he was resentful even of being elected class president by his white fellow- students: as he told Haley, "I was unique in my class, like a pink poodle." Not un- aware that he held a special promise, he speculated to his English teacher that he might like to become a lawyer; the